Does Foley Want A Redo? He Talks Of 'Wisconsin Moment'

CHRISTOPHER P. KEATING ckeating@courant.comThe Hartford Courant

GREENWICH -- Tom Foley is back and hoping for a Republican turnaround that will become Connecticut's own Wisconsin moment.

After coming within less than 1 percentage point of becoming governor in 2010, in Connecticut's closest gubernatorial election in more than 50 years, Foley is expected to be in the thick of the fight in a 2014 rematch with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

"I keep talking about 'when is the Wisconsin moment going to come to Connecticut,' " Foley said during a recent interview, referring to the high-profile Republican takeover in once-liberal Wisconsin in 2010. "These things happen almost when you least expect it."

Foley stresses that he has not decided whether to run and has not announced his candidacy. He says it's premature -- more than 15 months before the election -- to say if he would pick a running mate as lieutenant governor or let the candidates fight it out as they did in 2010.

But for an unofficial candidate, Foley certainly is full of criticisms of the Malloy administration.

For the past 21/2 years, he has been watching the Capitol from 90 miles away at his home in Greenwich, and he doesn't like what he sees. Foley, who spoke during an interview at a restaurant in his hometown, said Malloy has failed to create a pro-business climate that would make companies want to move to Connecticut and expand in the state. He cited a recent federal study that showed Connecticut as the only state last year that had negative growth.

In blue Connecticut, most of the major unions endorsed Malloy in the 2010 battle and helped provide the narrow margin of victory in the nail-biter contest against Foley. Now, Foley says, Malloy has failed to create a better fiscal climate in a state with too many business regulations and too much government spending.

"He's trying to out-Vermont Vermont," Foley said of Malloy. "Taking care of the unions, feeding all the people who are benefiting from public spending and sending the bill to the taxpayers."

Foley, a longtime Republican fundraiser who served as the former U.S. ambassador to Ireland, also criticized Malloy's "First Five" program of offering incentives to businesses. At the Jackson Laboratory under construction in Farmington, Foley said, the subsidy for an estimated 300 jobs in 10 years amounts to $1 million per job.

"He's buying jobs, and he's paying too much for them," Foley said. "It's knuckleheaded. It's a travesty that he's wasting taxpayers' dollars like that. All the money is borrowed. When that has to be paid back, someone else will be governor."

Foley is hoping that person will be him -- even though he has not yet declared his candidacy. One of Foley's most formidable potential rivals, House Republican leader Larry Cafero of Norwalk, recently dropped out of the race and is instead considering running for re-election after 20 years at the Capitol. Senate Republican leader John McKinney of Fairfield and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, who ran for lieutenant governor on Foley's ticket in 2010, are also considering running for governor.

Foley, 61, says he believes Connecticut is ready for Republicans to wrest back some control in the same way that they held the governor's office for 16 years and three of the five congressional seats -- when Republicans Rob Simmons, Nancy Johnson and Chris Shays held power from 2001 until 2007.

But Roy Occhiogrosso, a former Malloy administration spokesman who expects to advise Malloy's 2014 campaign, said Foley should not expect Connecticut to duplicate the Wisconsin experience.

"He'll be waiting a long, long, long time," Occhiogrosso said. "Tell him not to hold his breath."

Concerning Foley's statements about Vermont, Occhiogrosso said, "That's why there are fewer government employees than the day Dan Malloy took over. Is that what he's talking about? That's why he negotiated the largest savings over the longest period of time that's ever been negotiated in the history of the state, including by Tom Foley's good friend, John Rowland. Is that what he's talking about?"

"Being a governor is a serious job," Occhiogrosso said. "It's not like buying a company, breaking it up, and laying people off."

Democrats are expected to continue questioning whether Foley would have signed a strict gun-control bill, as Malloy did following the shooting deaths of 20 children and six women at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. Gun control became the biggest issue of the last legislative session, but Foley has repeatedly declined to say whether he would have signed the bill. Instead, he continues to say the bill would have been completely different if he was governor.

"Newtown was a mental illness case," Foley said. "There wasn't much in there at all" on mental illness in the bill that became law.

CT POLICY INSTITUTE

Since the 2010 election. Foley has created the Connecticut Policy Institute, a think tank with an annual budget of about $150,000 that produces research papers and has recently expanded into hosting guest speakers in public discussions on timely topics.

When Foley was thinking of creating the nonprofit institute in 2011, he advertised through an email that was sent to students at the Yale Law School, which led to the hiring of Benjamin Zimmer, a Yale Law and Harvard College graduate.

"I wanted to make sure this wasn't some Republican political thing, and he assured me it wasn't," Zimmer said. "At the end of the day, I have the final say on what we do and what we publish. What we're doing is pretty rigorous, substantive, non-ideological work."

During a recent introduction in New Haven, Foley said he purposely noted Zimmer's credentials with Obama as he introduced him to the audience.

"We are nonpartisan, despite some curiously sensitive people in the state who insist we aren't. But we are," Foley told the crowd. "We really are about coming up with solutions to Connecticut's problems."

At the forum at Gateway Community College, Foley's institute hosted a crowd of about 35 people to hear New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman speak in detail about urban crime prevention and community policing.

Regardless of the speakers the institute sponsors, Occhiogrosso said, the main point of Foley's efforts is political.

"Can we stop calling it a policy institute, please?" Occhiogrosso asked. "We should call it Tom Foley's political action committee. Dean Esserman is a very qualified public servant who has done some incredible work. That doesn't mean Tom Foley's organization is a think tank. They have nothing to do with each other. ... Calling it a policy institute is like calling Fox News at the national level an objective news outlet. It's ridiculous."

POSSIBLE 2014 REMATCH

In 2010, Malloy beat Foley by fewer than 7,000 votes, and a June Quinnipiac University poll shows that a 2014 rematch could be equally close. The poll showed Foley with a lead of 3 percentage points over Malloy in a poll with a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

Meanwhile, the governor's overall disapproval rating is now 47 percent, up from 39 percent in mid-March, according to the poll. The highest dissatisfaction is with Malloy's handling of taxes: 63 percent disapprove of his performance and 29 percent approve.

Some of that dissatisfaction was displayed recently during the Eastern League All-Star game in New Britain. When Malloy was introduced to the crowd, fans booed so loudly that Malloy briefly stopped his remarks.

"Most politically active Democrats certainly have looked with considerable concern at the governor's approval ratings," said Matthew J. Hennessy, a longtime Democratic operative. "Since he's gotten into office, the Q Poll has never had him above 50 percent in job-approval ratings. The longer that that trend continues, it hardens. There are very few people who don't know Dan Malloy now and don't have an opinion on him. He's building a ceiling on support."

But Hennessy said Malloy's chances could improve if the lackluster state economy improves because voters would be more likely to support an incumbent. In addition, he said, Democrats aren't as worried as they might be because they do not fear Foley as a particularly strong candidate.

"As the Democrats look at the field that was potentially against Malloy, they start to feel a lot better because you can't beat somebody with nobody," Hennessy said.

Many of the criticisms of Foley from the last race -- as an out-of-touch CEO and Greenwich multimillionaire who once ran a textile plant at The Bibb Co. in Georgia -- are expected to come up again.

Foley said comparisons to former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, made by Hennessy and Occhiogrosso, are designed to be negative, but are somewhat baffling to him. Foley once interviewed for a job with Romney after graduating from Harvard Business School, and he has since raised money for Romney's campaigns.

"I'm flattered. Romney is a truly exceptional guy," Foley said. "He was governor of Massachusetts and beat a Democrat."